Critical But Not Cynical - A Challenge for Researchers in the Field of Educational Science

Author(s):

Annika Åstrand(presenting / submitting)Gudrun Holmdahl(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 03 E, Research Policies and the Politics of Research (Part 2)

Paper Session: continued from 23 SES 02 E, to be continued in 23 SES 04 E

Time:

2014-09-02

17:15-18:45

Room:

B338 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Terri Seddon

Contribution

The purpose of this study is to illustrate what it might mean to become a researcher in a collaborative project focusing school development. The starting point is two researchers (the authors) stories of the time as doctoral students in a multi-year school research and school development project - School Development as Change of Local Organizations (National Agency for Education 2002) - with multiple parties involved.

Educational research and educational policy have a long and intertwined history, both in a European and Swedish perspective (Ball 2006; Carlgren & Hörnqvist 1999; Fransson & Lundgren 2006). Over time, this interweaving has shifted focus: in the beginning educational, psychological and sociological education research was used in building the welfare state, in recent decades, neo-liberal streams of thought lies behind school reform, focusing on quality, evaluation, leadership and accountability (Ball 2006; Carlgren & Klette 2008; Klette 2002; Ozga 2000).

This management model of today, management by objectives, and its way of steering by remote control, means that ”questions of how” has been provided to the local scene, which places great demands on those working in these local areas (Carlgren & Hörnqvist 1999). In this wake of a more detailed control a gap has occurred, which various actors, consultants and educational researchers claims to fill (Ball 2006; Carlgren och Hörnqvist 1999). It is in this context of collaboration between research and practice this study unfolds, and even if the interweaving of educational research and educational policy is a problematized area (Carlgren & Hörnqvist, 1999; Forsberg, 2012), there are few studies that highlights what implications collaborative projects with both research and normative claims may have for those involved.

For graduate students or researchers in the field of educational science, this can mean a dilemma. Researchers are expected to be and act independently. According to the Higher Education Act (SFS 2013:1117) and Higher Education Ordinance (SFS 1998:1003) research should be conducted objectively without other interests than the scientific. Research must not be conducted tendentiously. At the same time research, according to the public outreach for universities, must make public benefit. How it should be done, however, is negotiable.

We would argue that a collaborative project with claims of both research and practice development represents a special form of research, since it offers a complexity of different implications to relate to. The collaboration project in this study can be seen as a market place for various institutions with somewhat different goals and different professional ideas. Thus, the collaborative project is also a market place for different institutional practices (Angervall, Gustafsson, Lundahl & Silfvers 2013; Öhrn & Lundahl 2013 ), which in turn results in different discursive practices.

Research with more or less utilitarian objectives (eg school development research, action research, practice-based research) sometimes risk becoming normative and evaluative in that it relates uncritically to the discursive practice that scientific activity itself constitutes.On the other hand, research conducted from a more critical angel, which questions the (contemporary) discursive practice, and where education, education policy and education research can be the object of study, is in some cases incused by an almost cynical attitude. The gist of such research sometimes imply that no solution, whether educational, political or scientific training, is up to par, but at the same time nothing else is suggested.

Based on the above our research questions are:

- What does it mean for aspiring and junior researchers in the field of educational science to manage and simultaneously relate to the possibilities and limits of science?

- What might it mean for aspiring or junior researchers in the field of educational science to be critical without being cynical?

Method

Our research interest and the purpose of this forthcoming paper is associated with an increased insight that graduate students (prospective researchers) “are in critical phases of establishment and positioning within the academy” (Öhrn & Lundahl 2013, p.14). There is a connection between academic career and institutional conditions and academic positioning as negotiated, shaped and created as a part of and through the institutional, discursive practice that the students are part of: “the academic position … is dualistic in structure" (Angervall, Gustafsson, Lundahl & Silfver 2013, p. 31). Our position as PhD students in the described collaborative project can rather be described as pluralistic, and we have been searching for ways to investigate and understand these processes from a critical standpoint. Our choice fell upon performance autoethnography with its creative and analytic approach as a way to anchor our narratives in a dialogue with our context, “troubling the usual distinctions between self and others” (Denzin, 2013, p. 13). Thus, investigation objects in this study are we ourselves, and our experiences, during a period of our lives, being trained as researchers. We use ourselves as a meeting place for an inward and outward gaze as a means to interpret cultural experience (Neuman 1996). One approach in doing so is the autoetnographic method, where the researcher speaks in first-person-voice (Bochner & Ellis, 1996) and consider her preconceptions as an opportunity rather than a source of error (Holmberg, 2007). Antother way to describe this is as “a discursive activity that finds it’s bearings, practice, and value as a response to the ambiguities of a particular cultural and historical context” (Neuman, 1996, p. 193) In analysing our own texts and reports in retrospect and in relation to more public versions related to the same project we have applied a performance ethnographic approach. Performance ethnography draws on the idea: (a) that “our identities and daily practices are a series of performance choices (conscious and unconscious) that we improvise within cultural and social guidelines and (b) that we learn though [sic!] participation or through performance”(Jones, 2008, s.215).

Expected Outcomes

In this study we are trying to approach and question the ambivalent practice that researchers in the field of educational science have to handle when it comes to dealing with both the scientific possibilities and its limitations. We do it in the light of our own experience and the symbiotic relationship that has characterized the Swedish education policy and Swedish educational research until the present day and that can be seen as an aspect of the so-called social engineering and welfare liberalism (Boström and Lundmark 2012, p.43). The fact that supranational and parapolitical actors and agendas inserted in a "global architecture" (Ball, 2013) affect national policy processes does not make the scenery less complicated. Being a graduate student or researcher in the field of educational science means to live with and continually having to deal with the above-described ambivalence: on the one hand, researchers are expected to believe in the potential and the ability to contribute to a better society, on the other hand researchers are expected to formulate problems and conduct research so that a questioning of the current is made possible, eg a questioning of the widespread talk of school development and the discursive practice that it is included in. In a future panorama, collaborative projects with explicit utilitarian and enhancing purposes, might be even more opaque than the one we as research students participated in. Such projects are already here, inserted in the "global architecture" of educational policy making (Ball, 2013), where "new philanthropists operate in a parapolitical sphere within which they can develop their own policy agenda"(p. 31). This scenery is not only a challenge for the individual researcher, but for the entire educational scientific community.

References

Angervall, P., Gustafsson, J., Lundahl, L. och Silfver, E.(2013).Studiens kontext, begreppsram och empiri. I Kön och karriär i akademin: en studie inom det utbildningsvetenskapliga fältet. (p.19-37). Göteborg: Acta universitatis Gothoburgensis. Ball, S. J. (2006). Education policy and social class: The selected works of Stephen J. Ball. London: Routledge. Ball, S.J. (2013). The education debate. (2nd ed.) Bristol: Policy Boström, V. & Lundmark, K. (red.) (2012). Skoljuridik. (3. uppl.) Malmö: Liber Carlgren, I. och Hörnqvist, B. (1999). När inget facit finns – om skolutveckling i en decentraliserad skola. Stockholm: Skolverket. Carlgren, I. och Klette, K. (2008). Reconstructions of Nordic Teachers: Reform policies and teachers' work during the 1990s. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 52(2), 117-133. Davies, B. & Harré, R.(2007). “Positioning: The discursive production of selves”. In: Athenea Digital. (Athenea Digital, 2007, (12):242-259) Denzin, N.K. (2013). Performance Ethography. Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. London: Sage. Ellis, C. and Bochner, A.P. (1996). Composing Ethtnography. Alernative Forms of Qualitative Writing. London: Sage. Forsberg, E. (2012). Styrningen av den obligatoriska skolan - mellan stabilitet och förändring. I U. P. Lundgren, R. Säljö, & C. Liberg, (red.), Lärande, skola, bildning: [grundbok för lärare], 2., [rev. och uppdaterad] (p.437-459). Natur & kultur, Stockholm, 2012 Fransson, K. and Lundgren, U.P (2006). Utbildningsvetenskap – ett begrepp och dess sammanhang. Uppsala: The Swedish Research Council. Holmberg, L. (2007). Communication in palliative home care, grief and bereavement. Doctoral thesis, Malmö: Malmö University. Jones, S.H. (2008). Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political. I: N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (red.) (2008).Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials. (3. ed.).(ss.205- 245). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. Klette, K. (2002). Reform policy and teacher professionalism in four Nordic countries. Journal of Educational Change 3, 265–282. National Agency for Educattion (2002). Överenskommelse (Dnr 84–2002:1 096). Stockholm: Skolverket. Neuman, M. (1996). Collecting ourselves at the end of the century. In C Ellis & A.P. Bochner, A.P. (red.) (1996). Composing ethnography: alternative forms of qualitative writing. (p.172- 198). London: Sage. Ozga, J. (2000). Policy research in educational settings: Contested terrain. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Öhrn, E. and Lundahl, L. (2013). Kön och karriär i akademin: en studie inom det utbildningsvetenskapliga fältet. (2013). Göteborg: Acta universitatis Gothoburgensis.

Author Information

Annika Åstrand (presenting / submitting)

Karlstad University

Institution of educational studies

Karlstad

Gudrun Holmdahl (presenting)